open source products

ChickTech is based in Portland but plans to be nationwide by 2016. After interviewing Jennifer Davidson about how ChickTech gets girls involved in tech, I have high hopes it's even sooner. The non-profit targets girls who would never nominate themselves to participate in a tech workshop and who wouldn't dream of a career in tech. Why? Because they've never had someone believe their skills were valuable in that world...

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce that its Corporate Membership has doubled in the latter half of 2014. This expansion demonstrates a growing interest in open source and follows OSEHRA’s very successful 3rd Annual Open Source Summit. Read More »

Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, argues that when companies lock in to their own design and customizations, it’s as harmful as when they lock in to a vendor. Mickos explains why he thinks using standardized open source products is the best way to avoid both types of lock-in...

ThoughtWorks first began contributing to OpenMRS in 2006 and since that time, we've had over fifty committers to OpenMRS in GitHub. Incidentally, one in every seven OpenMRS contributor in GitHub is a ThoughtWorker! Naturally, in 2013, when we had the opportunity to build Bahmni, an open source hospital information system, we choose OpenMRS as the underlying Electronic Medical Records System (EMR). Bahmni leverages the mature data model and APIs of OpenMRS, whilst providing an out-of-the-box system that can be immediately used by hospitals.

ThoughtWorks, a global technology company, today issued the latest Technology Radar, an assessment of trends significantly impacting software development and business strategy. The Technology Radar sets out the current changes in software development - things in motion to pay attention to based upon ThoughtWorks' day-to-day work and experience solving their clients' toughest challenges. "Our latest Technology Radar focuses on some exciting trends that are changing the way companies and tech practitioners deploy open source systems and Cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS)," said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks.

I just finished attending two conferences: the Cloud Foundry Summit and the OpenStack Summit. Both were hives of activity, with attendance well up on the previous event. Most striking to me was the significant presence of large enterprise IT decision-makers — architects, directors of applications and operations, and even a sprinkling of CIOs.

The AOC grew up out of a pick-up game of sorts between the users (Air Force personnel) and the vendors (commercial and government programs). The users simply bought what they wanted, and the vendors happily took their money and installed the systems. The result was a collection of standalone systems; each came installed with its own hardware and software, and there was very little sharing of resources between them. While the team made it work through sheer willpower, it was horribly inefficient, a maintenance nightmare, not user friendly, and agility was measured in decades. Our job was to take that mess and fix it...This was my first trial-by-fire experience that showed the true resistance within the Air Force and Department of Defense (DoD) to open source software...